by J. Lee Ready
By May the 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division was in action against Greek partisans. The V SS Mountain Corps was operating in Yugoslavia. The 7th SS Prinz Eugen Mountain, 8th SS Florian Geyer Cavalry and 13th SS Handschar Mountain Divisions were in combat in Yugoslavia, where the Titoists were as deadly as ever. The Handschar had a new commander and he was a character. Forty-nine year old Standartenfuehrer Desiderius Hampel was a Yugoslavian Volksdeutsch that had soldiered in World War One in a Croatian regiment of the Austrian Army. He became a forester, but the beginning of World War Two saw him in the Hungarian Army. And in 1941 he joined the Croatian Army. In May 1942 he joined the SS and served as a member of the SS Prinz Eugen. He was not a Nazi.
There were no ‘rear areas’ in Yugoslavia as Brigadefuehrer Wilhelm Behrends found out when he was appointed HSSPF for Serbia and Montenegro. He had to have bodyguards wherever he went. Indeed even in Slovenia, near its borders with Italy and Austria, the partisans were just as active. Here Italian partisans and Titoists both criss-crossed the border. The 28th SS Police Regiment Todt was transferred from France to Slovenia to help control this partisan infestation, but to no avail. Despite their police status, these men had begun as Organisation Todt laborers! Also battling partisans in this border region was SS Police Regiment Alpenvorland, a detachment of Cossacks under SS control, and an Italian force of naval infantry known as the Condotierri Division. In May Sturmbannfuehrer Christian Wirth, Himmler’s great exterminator, was killed in a Titoist ambush.
Himmler ordered Hauptsturmfuehrer Kurt Rybka to form four companies of paratroopers from SS officers and men who had disgraced themselves in some manner, calling the force the 500th SS Parachute Battalion. If a member performed exceptionally well he might rehabilitate himself. In May 1944 Rybka sent the unit after Tito himself. Two companies landed at Drvar by parachute and two by glider. They failed to catch the elusive guerilla leader, but they did capture Tito’s brand new uniform, which they held up for the newsreel cameras!
The 6th SS Nord Mountain Division, now under Gruppenfuehrer Lothar Debes, was still holding back the Soviet Karelian Front in the Arctic Circle.
On the Latvian-Russian border the VI SS Corps of the 15th and 19th SS Lettische Grenadier Divisions and 106th SS Lettische Panzergrenadier Regiment was holding back part of the Soviet 2nd Baltic Front. A particularly sad loss for the Latvians was the death of Standartenfuehrer Voldemar Veiss.
The III SS Panzer Corps of the 11th SS Nordland Panzergrenadier Division, 4th SS Nederland Panzergrenadier Brigade and a company of the 102nd SS Heavy Panzer Detachment [soon renamed 502nd] was still holding back the Soviet Leningrad Front at Narva. [The designation 102nd meant the detachment took orders directly from a corps headquarters, and 502nd meant it received orders directly from an army headquarters.] A small but welcome reinforcement here was the 101st SS Vielfacherwerfer Battery. The 20th SS Estnische Infantry Division was in line just to their south and had been reinforced by the SS Narva Battalion.
The 9th SS Hohenstaufen Panzer and 10th SS Frundsberg Panzer Divisions had been battling the Soviet First Tank Army along the Seret River since early April, but were then transferred to fend off Soviet attacks at Kowel. They had already lost some key personnel such as Robert Frank a highly decorated battalion commander.
The 3rd SS Totenkopf Panzer Division and a company of the 502nd SS Heavy Panzer Detachment were preparing to welcome a Russian offensive into Romania.
The 14th SS Galizien Grenadier Division and 1st SS Charlemagne Sturmbrigade were in reserve on the Eastern Front.
The SS Dirlewanger Battalion and SS RONA Brigade were fighting partisans in Byelorussia.
The SS Italien Sturmbrigade was still in combat at Anzio in Italy and was now joined by the entire 16th SS Reichsfuehrer Panzergrenadier Division of Brigadefuehrer Max Simon. One of the division’s company commanders was Hans Doering. Having been a sailor in World War One, a Freikorps soldier, a politician, a scharfuehrer in the SS LAH, a salesman, an SS RSHA brigadefuehrer and SSPF in the Ukraine, he was now assigned to the SS Reichsfuehrer Division as a hauptsturmfuehrer. Here he seems to have found his forte.
The 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division, 6th SS Langemarck Sturmbrigade and 5th SS Wallonie Sturmbrigade were resting. The 21st SS Skanderbeg Mountain and 22nd Maria Theresa Cavalry Divisions were still in training. It has been suggested that during its training in Albania and Kosovo the SS Skanderbeg helped round up Jews for rail transportation to unknown destinations.
The 18th SS Horst Wessel Panzergrenadier Division was now ready for action, having finished its training in Hungary and Croatia. Named after a part-time SA stormtrooper and full-time pimp that had been killed in a street brawl with Communists, this outfit was per Hitler’s orders supposed to be raised from SA members, but instead Himmler had ignored Hitler and had formed it with a recipe of his own making: the 1st SS Motorized Brigade, the StuG Battalion of the 6th SS Nord Mountain Division, some German conscripts and many Hungarian Volksdeutsch ‘volunteers’. It had a smattering of veteran officers, such as Standartenfuehrer Heinrich Petersen, who had served with the SS Totenkopf and SS Prinz Eugen Divisions, and Oberfuehrer August Trabandt, a World War One veteran who had recently commanded the 1st SS Motorized Brigade, and he soon gained command of this new division though he was not a Nazi. Another veteran of this brigade was Hauptsturmfuehrer Heinrich Sonne, a Latvian Volksdeutsch, who had earned the Knights Cross as a motorcycle leader. Most of the brigade’s combat experience had been gained fighting Soviet partisans.
And Himmler was still forming new units. The 23rd SS Kama Mountain Division, named after the mythical homeland of the Bosnians, was being raised by Standartenfuehrer Hellmuth Raithel from Roman Catholic Croatians, Protestant and Catholic Yugoslavian Volksdeutsch and Moslem Bosnians. Raithel had won praise serving in the Handschar. He was not a Nazi and had only transferred from the German Army to the SS in 1943. He had previously fought in Norway and on Crete. Fortunately Raithel would have an experienced German cadre, men such as Sturmbannfuehrer Heinrich Albrecht. Despite the presence of Titoists in Bosnia, the SS Kama would train here.
Another of Himmler’s units was the East Turkic SS Corps. Its battalions were fighting partisans in Byelorussia as independent formations.
The Crimean Self-Defense Corps of Tatars no longer soldiered in their Crimean homeland, as it had been overrun by the Soviets, and they now performed anti-partisan sweeps in Poland. Himmler was their boss, as they were schumas, but he now went one step further, taking the best of them into the SS and creating the 1st SS Tatar Mountain Brigade. Led by Standartenfuehrer Fortenbacher, the brigade went to Hungary for training.
Himmler had decided to accept more Moslems into the SS and he commandeered enough members of the Caucasus Moslem Legion to create the SS Caucasus Moslem Regiment of several ethnicities including Chechens, Rutuls and Karachais.
This gave the Waffen SS of May 1944 a total of five corps headquarters, twenty-three divisions, eight independent brigades, two independent regiments and several battlegroups plus many smaller independent battalions and companies.
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Chapter Thirty-four
JUNE 1944: A TWO-FRONT WAR
At the end of May 1944 10,000 German troops made a truce with 15,000 Albanian partisans who hated Communists more than Nazis, and together they launched an offensive against Enver Hoxha’s Communist partisans. Hoxha had accepted several thousand anti-fascist Italians in September 1943. In June the 21st SS Skanderbeg Mountain Division joined this battle and performed well.
The 13th SS Handschar Mountain Division was currently advancing against Titoists in Bosnia, when suddenly the divisional artillery component at Lopare near Tuzla was assaulted by partisans who had slipped around the main body. An entire artillery battalion was cut off and chopped up.
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By 1 June 1944 the 1st SS LAH Panzer Division had achieved a remarkable comeback strength of 19,500 men, though it was still short of equipment, meaning in real terms that the
division was under-gunned compared to the previous year.
The loan of army officers to the 12th SS HJ Panzer Division was something the army would never have tolerated four years earlier, but the Waffen SS had proven itself time and time again. By now army generals breathed a sigh of relief when they learned that Waffen SS units were reinforcing them. A perfect example of this trust and respect was that Sepp Dietrich was now given the job of advising the creation of the army’s latest armored division, named Panzer Lehr. [Lehr = Training. It was based on an armored warfare display team.]
Everybody knew the Anglo-Americans were about to invade France. Indeed the Germans had expected them in May. Most of the US Army had yet to see action in this war, and though the British had been at war for five years the bulk of their ground troops had also not yet engaged the enemy. The Canadians would be coming to the party as well, and only two of their five divisions had seen prolonged action. The Germans were banking on the inexperience of the Allied units. The British, Canadians and Americans were eager, and furthermore they were equipped beyond the dreams of the Germans. Hitler may have made callous decisions about ‘no withdrawals’ and ‘fight to the last’ and so on, but he was still a realist in June 1944 and he knew he could not match the preponderance of equipment these Anglo-Americans could bring against him, telling his generals: “........the enemy must be thrown back at the first attempt.” [From W. Warlimont’s ‘From the Invasion to the Siegfried Line’, World War II Military Studies, Garland.]
Hitler had narrowed his expectations to a landing in either the Pas de Calais or Normandy, preferring the latter, but he allowed his generals to persuade him that the former was the real target and that any Normandy landing might be a diversion. This change in German strategy was one of the greatest mistakes of the war.
Inside France the Waffen SS with only three complete divisions and one partial strength division was numerically inferior to the German Army, which had fifty-three divisions here. Yet Hitler knew he might need armor in the Normandy region and by June he had placed seven panzer divisions within reach, including the SS LAH, SS Das Reich and SS HJ. Equipment-wise the SS was looking good here, with 177 medium tanks assigned to the SS HJ and 157 parceled between the SS LAH and SS Das Reich. Moreover, these divisions had Jagdpanzers, StuGs and self-propelled artillery. There were also some Tigers available in attached SS units. The three nearest army panzer divisions had 470 medium tanks between them. Thus about 45% of the armor available to Hitler to throw the Allies back into the sea was crewed by SS. In other words this vital campaign was to be fought with the SS playing an essential role.
However, the senior officers of the SS formations were under no illusions. Each US armored division possessed about 185 medium tanks and 55 self-propelled guns, and each British armored division had around 250 medium tanks and 25 self-propelled guns. Moreover, the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were in no position to prevent these Allied divisions from being shipped across the sea to the beachhead, whereas the Allied air forces were already making movement in daylight on French roads and rail lines a risky business. Within a week of the invasion, the Germans calculated, they would probably be outnumbered in armor two and a half to one.
There was also a potential morale problem. The actual Germans in the ‘German’ forces would face the British and Americans willingly, because the German soldiers believed that the Anglo-Americans were not just at war with them but with their wives, sweethearts, parents and kids. Every day German soldiers were receiving news that their loved ones had been killed or maimed in an Allied bombing raid. Many a German had a personal score to settle, something the Tommies and GIs never understood. However, many of the Volksdeutsch and most of the foreign troops wearing German uniform in France had joined to fight Communists. Thus French Communists were fair game. However, they had not voted to fight the British or Americans. These men had made the decision that the conflict against Communism took precedence over the conflict against Nazism/Fascism. The Nazis tried several propaganda methods to explain to these troops that the British could have made peace in June 1941 and could have joined in the war against the Soviets. After all just one year earlier in 1940 the British had actually raised an army to fight the Soviets! Yet the British had chosen to side with atheist Communism against ‘God Believing’ Nazism, and the Americans had made the same choice. SS often declared themselves ‘God Believing’ rather than Lutheran or Catholic or such. Nazi propaganda stated that the Communist soldier of the Soviet Red Army was a disciple of the anti-Christ, the devil himself, and that the Anglo-Americans were certainly the side-kicks of the devil. For semi-literate Eastern European soldiers symbolism was powerful. It was not lost on them that their enemies used the satanic emblem of the star: five pointed red for the Soviets, five pointed white for the Anglo-Americans and six pointed yellow for the Jews. Whereas every one of the European Axis nations used a Christian cross as their national emblem.
Still, the German high command worried that the Volksdeutsch and foreign soldiers would not fight the invading Anglo-Americans. And this was important because in addition to actual Germans, the German Nineteenth Army in southern France had 19,000 osttruppen to defend the coast, the Seventh Army in Normandy had 36,500 osttruppen on the beaches and close by, and the Fifteenth Army in northern and central France had no fewer than 58,000 osttruppen. Plus all three armies had thousands of hiwis.
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In the middle of the night (2:30am 6 June 1944) the SS HJ was alerted to scan the night sky for airborne troops and was ordered to ‘take a look’ at the coast along the mouth of the Dives River in Normandy. The troops had already been awoken by air raids, and sensing that ‘something was up’ they had already begun to stir.
Yet come dawn the division was ordered to Lisieux, which would send them away from the coast! They did as ordered, but with the impression that someone at headquarters had got things ‘screwed up’, in the time-honored manner of soldiers everywhere.
Dietrich was even more confused for he was kept out of the information loop completely until late afternoon on the 6th, by which time everyone seemed to know the Allies had indeed landed on the coast of northwest Normandy. Only now did Dietrich receive orders to take command of the SS HJ and three army divisions: the 716th Infantry, Panzer Lehr and 21st Panzer; and his mission was to drive the enemy back into the sea! Is that all? His staff must have thought, with sardonic humor. It would be nightfall before any of the SS HJ troops could be in a position to counterattack. As far as the SS was concerned one of the most crucial days of the war had been wasted.
Again it says a lot for the army’s new attitude towards the Waffen SS, that this most crucial of all counterattacks was entrusted to an SS officer and his staff.
For the SS this day was not just a confused drive of a hundred miles and more, but it was one of battle too, for the skies were peppered with Allied war planes that played upon the German vehicles every few minutes. Bombed vehicles were shoved aside by a tank so that the column could move again. Everyone on the ground was searing with frustration, especially when they drove passed a vehicle containing the burning corpses of their friends. The flak gunners of the division got a chance to fire back at the planes, as did some of the machine gunners, but most troops jumped off their vehicles and ran into the fields with every strafing run.
Dietrich was further frustrated when he learned that the 716th Infantry and 21st Panzer Divisions had already counterattacked the enemy beachhead, but no one knew the results, nor was there any way he could influence their movements because their communications were out. It was midnight before Dietrich learned that elements of 21st Panzer had in fact reached the sea, but without reinforcements they were forced to withdraw. Furthermore, the 716th Infantry Division had almost ceased to exist. Most of its troops were margarine Germans from Poland and Russian osttruppen, and there was a suspicion many had deserted. There was no sign of the Panzer Lehr.
However, this Nazi attitude sold the osttruppen short, because on Omaha Bea
ch a battalion of Cossacks under Oberst Stabenov had performed very well machine-gunning the Americans of the 1st and 29th Divisions as they came ashore. One of the reasons why more Allied troops were lost this day on this one beachhead than on the other four put together was the presence of these Cossacks.
The second day of the invasion, 7 June, every German soldier was plagued by further delays. Some could not move until they were refueled. Others would not move, but parked themselves inside woods and copses to hide from the prying eyes of Allied fighter planes. Of those that did move, some were shot up by Allied planes, some got lost and some misunderstood their orders.
In the afternoon the ‘British’ were seen advancing towards Carpiquet Airfield just outside the town of Caen about five miles from the beach. Kurt Meyer was here with Max Wuensche and Karl Bartling and a handful of SS HJ units: namely a panzergrenadier battalion, a pioneer company, about fifty Mark IV tanks and a battalion of self-propelled artillery. Meyer ordered these men to dig in and then maintain complete silence. Only when the enemy tanks were almost upon his men did Meyer give the word, and they then opened fire at point blank range. Within minutes the shocked ‘British’ withdrew, and the SS men, now joined by another panzergrenadier battalion, advanced and entered the villages of Authie, Franqueville, Malon and Galmache. Taking prisoners they learned they were up against the 2nd Armored Brigade and 3rd Infantry Division, both of the Canadian Army, and also parts of the British Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. One of the veteran SS commanders was lost in this short but bloody affair, Sturmbannfuehrer Hans Scappini, who had fought throughout the war. But Meyer was well pleased, for with less than half a division he had defeated two and a half divisions.
Unlike German and Soviet infantry, British and Canadian infantry were fully motorized and possessed their own armored detachments of armored cars, lightly armored carriers and a few light tanks, and they were liberally provided with artillery.